Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (71 page)

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AGAINST OUR WILL

These are the deadly male myths of rape, the distorted proverbs that govern female sexuality. These myths are at the heart of our discussion, for they are the beliefs that most men hold, and the nature of male power is such that they have managed to convince many women. For to make a woman a willing participant in her own defeat is half the battle.

Cloaked in intricate phraseology, the male myths of rape ap pear as cornerstones in most pseudoscientific inquiries into female sexuality; they are quoted by many so-called "experts" on the sex offender. They crop up in literature; they charge the cannons of the dirty jokesters. They deliberately obscure the true nature of rape.

There is good reason for men to hold tenaciously to the notion that "All women want to be raped." Because rape is an act that men do in the name of their masculinity, it is in their interest to believe that women also want rape done, in the name of femininity. In the dichotomy that they have established, one does and one "is done to." This belief is more than arrogant insensitivity; it is a belief in the supreme rightness of male power.

Once the proposition that all women secretly wish to be rav ished has been established, it is bolstered by the claim that "No woman can be raped against her will." A variation runs "You can't thread a moving needle," used with wicked wit by Balzac in one of his
Droll
Stories, and retold ad nausearn, I am informed, by law pro fessors seeking to inject some classroom humor into their introduc tory lectures on criminal law. The concept seems to imply at first hearing that if the will of a woman is strong, or if she is sufficiently agile, she can escape unscathed. Four hundred rape-murders a year in this country, and the percentage of gang rapes, should offer strong testament to the cruel lie of this statement, but "No woman can be raped against her will" is not intended to encourage women to do battle against an aggressor-rather, it slyly implies that there is no such thing as forcible rape, and that it is the
will
of women to be ravished.

"She was asking for it" is the classic way a rapist shif ts the burden of blame from himself to his victim. The popularity of the belief that a woman seduces or "cock-teases" a man into rape, or precipitates a rape by incautious behavior, is part of the smoke screen that men throw up to obscure their actions. The insecurity of women runs so deep that many, possibly most, rape victims agonize af terward in an effort to uncover what it was in their be—

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havior, their manner, their dress that triggered this awful act against them.

The last little maxim that we must consider with a jaundiced eye,
"If
you're going to be raped, you might as well relax and enjoy it," deliberately makes light of the physical violation of rape, pooh poohs the insult and discourages resistance. The humorous advice that a violent sexual encounter not of your choosing can be fun if you play along and suspend your own judgments and feelings is predicated on two propositions: (a ) the inevitability of male triumph and ( b) "All women want to be raped."

Do women want to be raped? Do we crave humiliation, degra dation and violation of our bodily integrity? Do we psychologically need to be seized, taken, ravished and ravaged? Must a feminist deal with this preposterous question?

The sad answer is yes, it must be dealt with, because the popular culture that we inhabit, absorb, and even contribute to, has so decreed. Actually, as we examine it, the cultural messages often conflict. Sometimes the idea is floated that all women want to be raped and sometimes we hear that there is no such thing as rape at all, that the cry of rape is merely the cry of female ven geance in postcoital spite. Either way, the woman is at fault.

One popular reflector of the culture, the highly regarded John Updike, has incorporated both these points of view in his novels. First, a line from Couples:

He fought against her as a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed.

Now this exchange of dialogue from Rabbit Redux, and notice that it is the woman who makes the telling judgment:

"This is pretty slummy territory," he complains to Janice. "A lot of rapes lately down here."

"Oh," she says, "the paper prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind af ter ward."

Thus is the victim of rape summarily dismissed by Updike, but, oh, how she is romanticized by Ayn Rand in The Fountain head, the story of Dominique Francon and Howard Roark.

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I had not looked at
The Fountainhead
for more than twenty years (it has remained in print for three decades ), and when I requested it at the library, I was faintly anxious that the search for Dominique's undoing amid the more than seven hundred pages of Rand's opus might take more time than I cared to spend. I seri ously underestimated the universality of my interest. The library's copy of
The
Fountainhead opened itself to Dominique's rape. Hundreds of other readers had, in effect, indexed it for me. And I must say, the two-and-a-half-page scene was as torrid as I had remembered it-all the more remarkable in the light of present-day fiction since the genitals of the two antagonists are not even mentioned.

The vivid picture I had carried in my memory for more than twenty years was surprisingly accurate: architect Roark in work clothes, a stranger from the stone quarry, climbing through aristo crat Dominique's window late at night. The two of them locked in silent struggle. His victory, her defeat, and then his silent departure through the French windows. Not a word has been exchanged, but clearly this has been a coupling of heroes, a flashing signal of superior passion, a harbinger of the superior marriage that finally takes place offstage along about page
700.

And now, with the book before me, I can report verbatim Ayn Rand's philosophy of rape, as posited by Dominique, af ter the nocturnal visit of Roark:

It
was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him-and she would have remained cold, untouched
by
the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.

A week later Dominique is still mooning:

I've been raped. . . . I've been raped by some redheaded hood lum from a stone quarry. . . . I, Dominique Francon . . . . Through the fierce sense of humiliation, the words gave her the same kind of pleasure she had felt in his arms.

She wanted to scream it to the hearing of all.

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5

So this was grand passion! A masochistic wish by a superior woman for humiliation at the hands of a superior man! The Fountainhead heated my virgin blood more than twenty years ago and may still be performing that service for schoolgirls today.

Ayn Rand is the chief ideologue of a philosophy she calls Ob jectivism, essentially a cult of rugged individualism, vaguely right wing, and what I would call spiritually male. She is an example of the ways in which a strong, male-directed woman accommodates herself to what she considers to be superior male thought. Roark is Rand's philosophic hero; Dominique is merely an attendant jewel, a prize of prizes. But if rape for Roark is an act of individual heroism, of manhood, of challenge met and coolly dispatched, then rape for Dominique must embody similar values. When superman rapes superwoman, superwoman has got to enjoy it-that is the bind Rand has gotten herself into. Rand becomes, as does Helene Deutsch, whom I shall soon discuss, a traitor to her own sex.

Men have always raped women, but it wasn't until the advent of Sigmund Freud and his followers that the male ideology of rape began to rely on the tenet that rape was something women desired. The dogma that women are masochistic by nature and crave the "lust of pain" was first enunciated by Freud in a 1924 paper entitled "The Economic Problem in Masochism." This curious little essay, as obscure as it is short,* laid down the psychoanalytic rule that masochism in women is the preferred state, an expression of sexual maturity-or, in Freud's terms, "the final genital stage" obtaining from "the situation characteristic of womanhood, namely, the passive part in coitus and the act of giving birth."

Freud's male disciples embroidered dutifully on the master's theme, but it remained for a woman, the brilliant Viennese psy choanalyst Helene Deutsch, to construct the epic thesis of female masochism-and to become the ultimate authority for sex-crime experts who wished to explain away the victims of rape. Deutsch is a puzzling, contradictory figure in the history of psychology, who cannot be ignored or laughed at or easily dismissed. A prodigious

*
Part of the problem, to be perfectly fair to Freud, is that our American understanding of the translated words "economic" and "lust" differs signifi cantly from his German intention. A more accurate substitute for "economic" would be "utilitarian"; a more accurate substitute for "lust" would be "thrill." Still and all, the essay is not one of Freud's finest.
It
is confused and uncertain and lacks the drama of some of his other works.

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intellect and a powerf ul personality ( one can make that judgment from the force of her writing ) , she rigorously probed the depths of her own psyche and that of her patients to create her dramatic theories of female sexuality. Her first papers were written in Ger man, but af ter she came to this country in
1935
and settled in Boston she switched, almost effortlessly it seems, to a strong and lucid English.
Psychology of
Women, a two-volume work pub lished here in
1944
and
1945,
is the culmination of her ideas.
It
influenced much of the thinking about women in the conservative, back-to-the-kitchen nineteen fif ties.

I became aware of Deutsch's theory that masochism is an essential element of femininity, and a condition of erotic pleasure, when I was in my early teens. Her pronouncements were piously quoted in all the popular books and magazine articles of the day that purported to teach women how to "accept" their female role. Since that time Helene Deutsch has been for me a particular symbol of that which is inimical to women. I believe she has caused real-and incalculable-damage to the female sex, as has, it goes without saying, Freud. But I want to say loudly and clearly that
Psychology of
Women is a towering work.
It
is a brave, pioneer study, a merciless exploration of the shameful underpin nings of female psychosexuality, as
it
has been
conditioned by
men. Superstrict Freudian to the end, Deutsch mistook what sometimes
is
for what must be, and that is her tragedy-and ours.